To answer the 'Call for comment' about intersecting complex shapes... one simple, fast, general, approximate, discrete method is to use OpenGL to get your GPU to do it for you. Just render the shapes into an off-screen framebuffer, using appropriate logic ops or stencil planes, then read back the final buffer to get a bitmask of the possible positions. To reduce to one estimate of position, find the centroid of the largest contiguous pixel group (flood-fill different seed ids; histogram pixels; select region id with highest count).
What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?
81–88 of 88 posts
Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm gonna take a wild guess, and say that the NSA has a monopoly on the talent for this field.
Mapping is wide and common industry, just like web or finance. The NSA only recruits in the USA. It's a fraction of the talent pool of the planet.
NSA violate the constitution on a daily basis, I'm sure they have a loophole to get whatever talent they need
Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?
#83I was hoping there would be some information in here about what cell phones leak that a third party could pick up on. For example, tracking the mac address in beacon packets, or the cell frequency equivalent of that. Of course if you can hook into the base stations you can track them.
Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?
#84Please don't abuse this :) https://github.com/ernw/ss7MAPer
Could you give a high level of what the ss7 network is and what this tool does? I'm not very familiar with this area.
Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?
#85this method will only work with GSM network because 1.GSM networks doesn't verify BTS 2.GSM encrypt keys are cracked and all over the internet. Users of other kind of networks should not worry about this kind of hack. Actually here in China a fake BTS a.k.a 伪基站 can be easily purchased online.
"this method will only work with GSM network because ..." Yes, that's true - but remember that all of our 3G/4G phones are also 2G phones and that if you disable/jam/overpower the 3G/4G signals the phone will very happily revert down to 2G, possibly with no encryption, and possibly in a way that you have to be very careful to even notice. There are quite a few attacks that are mitigated by 3G/4G in theory, but in pra…
It works on all generations: 2G 3G 3.5G 4G LTE.
Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mapping is wide and common industry, just like web or finance. The NSA only recruits in the USA. It's a fraction of the talent pool of the planet.
NSA violate the constitution on a daily basis, I'm sure they have a loophole to get whatever talent they need
Care to elaborate?
Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember something similar, it was a presentation given at CCC in Germany. Tried searching for it on their YouTube channel, just to discover said channel was terminated for breaking YouTube ToS?! That's really sad, their channel had videos of all the past talks from the CCC, an amazing resource that's now gone. I think this is the one you might have been talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsIriAdbttc If…
You probably were thinking of the CCCen YouTube channel? That never was an official channel, but a copy-cat that just uploaded all the CCC stuff, and was banned for it.
Yeah, I now realized this too. Still weird as CCCen had the videos organized in a more useful way, thus popping up way above in search results.
At least good to know the stuff is still there.
Re: What Does It Take to Track a Million Cell Phones?
#88Nothing worthwhile ever takes an intern and six months. Ever.
One has to wonder why interns even bother. /s